It is widely recognized that good problem solving and thinking skills need to be learned and supported. The availability of computers and electronic information bring an opportunity to support this need. There is today no approach that teaches and supports creating problem solving and thinking as a whole, integrated discipline, including the evolution of the person's understanding of the problem, exercising of logic and judgment, development of knowledge and ideas, and the mastery of a comprehensive answer.
Today, the teaching of problem solving and thinking and related topics occurs as a result of many disparate activities. But these exercises are mostly taught separately and independently, and are unpredictable in their results. Whether an individual or a team becomes “end to end” problem solvers—capable of defining a problem, finding and researching information, developing their own understanding, defining alternatives and eventually an answer supported by their work—is uncertain.
Computer and information technology support of problem solving and thinking is fractured and focuses primarily on information handling activities. Separate and independent software programs support search and retrieval, information manipulation and management, information presentation and communication, and others. While this may be comfortable for many adults, little computer support exists for “thinking” and analysis logic particularly for the more qualitative topics that predominate. There are not software enabled processes that help guide good thinking, address the complexity of today's problems and information intensity and diversity of today's problems, and do so in way that balances generalizable and specialized or customized capabilities. There are also not software tools or products that do so for collaborative or other multi-user situations.
There is a need for a software tool that enables and supports a comprehensive problem solving and thinking process, especially in information intensive situations. There is a further need for a software tool that does so in a manner which allows for the customization of the environment provided to the user, especially to provide for more specialized, customized or content specific problem solving within the larger and more generalizable thinking and problem solving method and system. There is a further need for a software tool and approaches that support problem solving and take advantage of the standards and common approaches that increasingly and easily allow the incorporation of external resources and software components and modules to interact with and utilize one another. Given the vast amount of information available today, there is a further need for a software tool that provides for customized support for a user's information-intensive problem solving and thinking process, while also providing additional search capabilities in a manner that improves both the productivity and the quality of the work.